British English treats amalgamous entities like companies as groups of individuals, so you might say something like “Microsoft offer new set of rebates.”
This gives ample opportunity to wax philosophical about the reasoning behind this. I would assume something in the American mindset is driving it, maybe a “sum of the parts” logic.
Since it’s the only action game I ever claim to dominate, I often go back to Super Mario World for a nostalgic romp. I always play for 100% completion, and the game rarely feels tired or tiresome to me.
The funny thing is, I’m very opinionated about the “worst” things in the game, and my favorite things seem much more vague.
I hate Choco-World (the area before the Valley of Bowser), a painful afterthought punctuated by the awful Ghost Ship. Mario really shouldn’t rely on plot too much, but if they had done something to shore up (ha) the reasoning for that stupid ship, that would have helped.
Only the “Bridge Areas” following the arduous Vanilla Dome can compete with Choco’s non-world status. You literally feel like you’re on a bridge between two much better areas.
I assume much like the nerd-favorite, commonly-hated Part Two’s of famous trilogies, the Forest of Illusion has grown on me enough to say it might be in the favorites list. I bet a lot of other people hate it. The only issue with it is, much like Vanilla Dome, the “red levels” (multi-exit) make a 100% completion run very tedious, as you replay nearly everything at least once. If I were just running through it would be even better.
Donut (second world, where the feather shows up) has a sense of Mario-purity only slightly marred by the water and cave levels. Donut 1 is what I think of when I think Mario of any vintage.
I don’t normally like water levels, ever, but Soda Lake finds a way to be difficult but not in the normal water way. It’s like ballet timing and grace, and it’s the only time the Torpedo Teds show up, which are artistic treasures akin to the falling blocks’ angry faces.
Star World always felt a little labored to me; the solution was either instant (the cloud-riding one) or extremely drawn out and a little chancy (the last one). I believe each one has to be played both ways to get completion, though checking that might save me some agony.
A lot of the Special World scenarios are really neat experiments a bit too edgy to make it into the mainline game. Special 2’s fly-or-die P-balloon situation remains the hardest single experience I find in the game, far exceeding Soda Lake’s challenge. It’s still a crapshoot for me, and it takes several tries to get it right.
It’s surprising to me that so many of the boss battles are copied: the Valley of Bowser’s castle (not Bowser’s Castle, mind you, another feeling of game compression) is only one detail away from an exact match with the first world’s. The multi-use of Reznor as the fortress boss is another puzzler. You’re making the flagship game to a system whose success had to be fairly obvious. Why recycle stuff like that?
And you can say memory or processor, and I would point out the fall-themed, Mario mask koopas couldn’t have been easy on the memory situation. Especially for something only 2% of players will ever see.
Anyway, fun game, even after all this time.
My Sony and I are not on speaking terms any more, and I see a more robust MP3/MP4 player in my medium-term future. Preferably when they release a 16GB Sansa Fuze.
But, until I dig through the deplorably-maintained “electronics box” up here (it’s hard to fathom how difficult it is to split your stuff between two continents and store the most important stuff in a one-bedroom apartment), I’m stuck with one working earpiece, some weird static out of the other, and a truly quirky piece of high-quality but very brittle crap.
This is my second set of headphones, following a factory recall due to a gradually-hardening wire (mine flexed like a spring by the end, especially in cold weather), and about my fifth set of rubber earphone socks, since they have a penchant for popping off and rolling under airplane seats.
This isn’t an iPod, where you indifferently just plug a pair of Coby white earphones in if they bust: because of the noise cancelling feature, this is a proprietary headphone jack, with a notch and everything, and while I have discovered standard headphones will work, they kind of defeat the purpose of the thing.
One of the stupid features of the Walkman is that after plugging it into USB it “rebuilds your library” (not a requested function, but required for its architecture) and puts your music pointer (that’s always how I envision the iPod play model) on the “All Music” alphabetical listing at the first song in your library alphabetically.
This particular feature probably makes about 0.5% of the population happy. Why not just remember the previous song and go there unless it was deleted? I often have my Fallout Boy albums loaded on the player, and they have a song called “‘Tell that mick he just made my list of things to do today.’” with the quotes on there. Symbols win as far as alphabetical organization goes, so I often have a racial slur flashing on my screen whenever I sync my player.
Anyway, I have also spent countless hours trying to make album art work (it requires an undocumentedly small-sized ID3-embedded JPEG-only image, and does not respect the normal AlbumArt.jpg that WMP throws in the directory). I don’t mind so much the embedding: to me it makes more sense than magic-named images polluting a music folder. But, the lack of documentation made this a really painful task.
It’s also dang near impossible to get video to work on the thing. Apparently the Fuze is more flexible and has a reasonable official tool available online to do the dirty work for you. After hours and hours of FFMPEG experimentation, I have a batch file that works most of the time.
I also struggled with the song years. It apparently can only read the song year from a specific ID3 tag (ID3 dates have a few ways to go in) in a specific, undocumented format. That took a while, too.
File names are another problem with the videos. I played with naming conventions for my video files for a while, which at one point involved extra dots in the file name. Turns out, this gives an “invalid file format” error on the video player (I thought this was an encoding problem for the longest time). It’s sniffing to the right of the dot to discover the file format, and it didn’t do an “rfind” to start from the right, so it thinks your file format is like .2010.walkman.mp4.
These bugs are unacceptable in my eyes, especially for a high-end player. No firmware updates available. I would be glad to give up its excellent noise cancelling for a decently robust set of core operations. But, for all this airplane travel, it has made sense for its relatively short lifespan.
The only good part about staying at work super-late tonight was finally getting a shot of the hedgerow trashcan all filled up. You can see “more clean” at the top, but the garbage is partially obscuring the “environment for.” Also, they’re getting brave enough now to wedge the trash between the little shrub stalks. Poor shrubs don’t have much longer to live, I’m afraid:
I have thought through this post a few times, and always I have settled on not writing it. But, I think it’s about time to reflect on these things. There’s still a lot of time to go, but psychological time barriers are being breached as we go.
Going back up to add this paragraph, I notice my “not miss” is going to be significantly longer than my “miss.” It’s important to note the “miss” things are huge while the “not miss” things are generally small. This is another paradox of living abroad, I think. Sometimes it feels like two mountains, but one mountain is made up of molehills.
Things I will miss about Turkey:
Things I will not miss about Turkey:
(1) “God willing.” Every now and then, living in Asia Minor illuminates some memorable concepts from the Bible. The “do not worry” / “lilies of the field” discussion is one of them.
(2) The uninitiated might think the challenge is not tumping over, but it’s actually getting over the lip at the top once the stairs go flat.
(3) Away is one thing. Away is between LA and Chicago. Separated is feeling your daily life’s practical incompatibility with the lives of others.
(4) This is something I think a lot of people have trouble understanding about assignments abroad. If another country’s jokes make no sense, how can their workplaces be any anything but inscrutable?
(5) Behavioral and physical, it never stops happening and it never stops irking.
(6) It’s just not that big of a bill! Also, see “Cabbies” above.
(7) GMT+3 means any attractive time in the UK or mainland Europe runs over lunch time or quitting time.
(8) Not biscuits. You could make the same recipe in the same oven at the same altitude with the same ingredients, and still a cookie would be better than a biscuit.
After a lively lunchtime debate over improving the quality of public schools, I propose the following at state level:
20% pay increase for all classroom teachers, plus inflation, phased evenly over four years.
20% immediate pay cut for all administrators and non-classroom teachers, supported by immediate implementation of a performance bonus program with maximum target salary of 10% above current levels plus inflation.
Non-classroom professional roles not well-covered by the performance bonus program are subject to immediate job criticality review. Review challenges differential value to students, with the goal of aligning the bonus program correctly or eliminating the position.
Overall budget increases capped at 5% plus inflation each year for four years.
No Federal involvement in states’ education management or policies. Administrative savings applied exclusively to Federal deficit reduction.
Subject to individual review, teachers and administrators showing unsatisfactory performance results are subject to formal performance management programs and/or termination. Pension buyouts offered extensively to poorly-performing long-tenure teachers.
Federal education funding restricted to a state education superfund to be distributed to single-school or single-district applicants via a selection panel staffed by the state Chamber of Commerce. Federal funds also permitted to fund states’ pension buyouts/forced retirements.
Current pension and insurance benefits frozen or reduced, subject only to cost of living increases.
Professional retirees, who lack certification but are willing to work for less money and less benefits, will be heavily recruited and supported in obtaining certification.
With the drastic pay increase for teachers, I would expect a nearly immediate review of staffing levels followed by staff reductions of the least effective personnel. Many ineffective or excessively-paid senior staff would be bought out, encouraged by Federal pension buyout assistance. States’ pension liabilities would begin to ease, with benefits freezes supporting long-term solvency.
Poorly-performing administrators not leaving following the paycut will be driven out by cost pressure to support necessary staff levels of classroom teachers. Specialists and other non-classroom professionals will be pushed back into the classroom. This will be attractive due to the pay increase relative to non-classroom staff.
After-school and extracurricular/fine-arts programs will be placed under significant pressure. Superfund grants will help support programs not capable of reducing budgets or promoting higher booster club activities. The administrator bonus program would heavily reward good performance (and existence) of such groups, so administration is encouraged to “cut and cope” rather than eliminate programs altogether.
After the first four years, budgets will be reviewed. By this time, universities will have graduated the first class of teachers who began their education under the new system. Hiring for classroom jobs would be highly competitive, especially when competing against retirees for positions.
I actually think paying teachers more could work, with the right strings attached.
If I were still the mainstream analyst here, this would be the busiest time of the year for me. Since I am on special assignment, I have nothing to do.
I went ahead and booked an extra day of vacation for tomorrow to rest and get ready for Russia. I’m going to go change some lira into rubles soon (“wild” locations are worth commission to walk in with local money).
We also have our bribe money ready to go in case of any hangups, and all of our documentation is in order.
Depending on how things go, I might even bail a little early. It’s the big holiday week here, so unless you are working on the plan you don’t have much to stick around for.
Yesterday as I was walking to work, a guy had set up an electric bench grinder in the middle of a narrow, busy sidewalk outside a restaurant. He was sharpening one of the large knives they use to slice döner roast lamb chunks to make sandwiches in pita bread. No goggles, gloves, safety clothes, or anything, and no barrier to prevent somebody from walking right into him.
People just walked right by.
I am treating today as a victory lap. We got through testing last weekend, hit all our performance metrics, identified and corrected a major system setup issue, and filed a defect (bug report) for the only problem not ours to fix.
Filing a defect is like punting a gigantic turd. It still stinks, and now some of it is stuck to you, but at least you don’t have the turd anymore.
In a conversation with my big boss a while back, the subject of absurdity came up. Any place is crazy, but many would say Turkey is crazier than most. It’s just such an interesting country.
Have you ever had the situation when people ask how something’s going, and you say “really busy, doing lots of stuff right now,” and then when you try to produce details you can’t, you just know you were busy?
It struck me that I can say “things are crazy here,” and I could know that to be true, but in a year could I really speak for what about it was crazy, specifically?
So I’m going to do what I can to remember crazy things and write them down before I lose them and they go into one big generic mental box.
Local elections are coming up here, which from my understanding pretty much bubbles upward until the more important posts are decided. Anyway, the ruling party AKP, not our favorite, is getting a little more pressure than normal this year.
Concurrently, the AKP-controlled municipality just constructed a kind of containment housing for one of those really big urban steel trash bin things, kind of like a small dumpster, down the street from our building.
They planted these sad little one-stalk shrubs in a planter that goes around the top of the bin on all but one side (the side used to dump the thing out) and hung signs on the bin that talk about protecting the environment.
Well, the poor little bushes are already looking a little beaten down just from the bustle of a busy trashcan, but the funny thing is that the locals are feeling bad about the little guys. These trashcans are normally brim-full just about all the time (nothing is ever over-sized in Turkey except restaurants), and it’s quite normal to see trash bags and furniture and whatnot piled up high above the rim of the bin.
Taking pity on the poor plants, instead of piling the trash high they’re just throwing the bags and loose garbage onto the street, spilling out everywhere and stinking to high heaven. It’s not too uncommon now to see the Turkish “we care about the environment” sign with garbage piled up to the bottom of the sign.